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Great news! Plus an easier way. BUT...
Authored by: cleofus on May 30, '02 04:58:15PM

It is true that in a high speed virtual memory system there is no NEED for a RAM disk, but there is a USE for one! I still turn my Mac off when I'm not home (where it is) so I use a RAM disk for my cache for Netscape or IE. That way when I turn the computer off, my cache simply dissappears instead of remaining on the machine. When you create a RAM disk, you can point your cache to that "disk" and then the cache will run at RAM speeds, which is still faster than the virtual memory that ANY system has, and it will not stay with the computer and eventually need clearing out. If you simply quit Netscape or IE, you can clear it out manually (or with some script) as well as the history, and any other database that gets created whenever you run the web browsers. So for a security reason, it is easier to delete lots of unwanted tracking files with a RAM disk.



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Great news! Plus an easier way. BUT...
Authored by: geohar on May 31, '02 04:41:39AM

I see the point for killing the IE cache, but, it might well not be faster than doing it other ways. The point is, that all file i/o in unix is buffered via memory. This is done in such a way that with a good quantity of ram, the disk is very rarely written to. The vm system takes care of paging the 'dirty' file buffers to disk. I very much doubt if in osx the ram disk gets guaranteed ram residency. Therefore, when the system has need for extra pages, it too will be paged out to disk (and will sit there until paged in again). I may be wrong, but I think the only non-pagable part of the memory will be a set of core kernel code.

Cool hint though. I've been asked that a couple of times and couldn't work it out.



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